Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi hits Canada in April


The device that won best of show for this year’s CES, is finally destined for Canada, at least in Wi-Fi flavour.

According to a Motorola press release sent out today, the Android Honeycomb-powered tablet will be in retail “beginning April 2011.” If that wasn’t vague enough, there was no pricing info included either.

Beyond just a repeat of the specs for the Xoom, which most people are probably familiar with by now, the only new info that was offered was a list of the accessories that will be available at launch:

  • Standard Dock for watching videos on the Xoom while you listen through external speakers
  • A Speaker HD Dock “for sending HD content directly to a TV or clearly listening to music through two built-in speakers”
  • A Bluetooth keyboard with Android-specific shortcut keys

And – you guessed it – no pricing on these items either.

So stay tuned. Oh BTW, the 3G version is coming “mid-year”.

Update 2:54 p.m.: Okay looks like we have a price by way of a TELUS press release… $599. Interestingly, nowhere do they say that they have an exclusive on the Xoom, so hopefully more retailers will join the fray before the April launch.

Update Mar 22: You can pre-order the Xoom on FutureShop or BestBuy, both sites selling for $599 for the 32GB version. For some reason Motorola hasn’t seen fit to offer a 16GB version to match the 16GB iPad 2, though some rumours suggest this may yet change.

Related: Check out Marc’s video tour of the Xoom

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3 comments

  1. Bobby Mikels

    I think the best way for Motorola Xoom to compete with iPad is by dropping their price. It is very hard for consumers to try something new since the Tablet device was an innovation of Apple. We all know how good the features of Xoom are but since people only knows one brand when it comes to tablets, all of this will go into waste.

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    • Raj

      @Bobby – “…Tablet device was an innovation of Apple.” Sorry Bobby, this is in fact incorrect. Other companies have made these years ago. However, Apple is the one that made it very appealing to the general mass as Apple is famous for doing this.

      Raj

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  2. Shawn L.

    Future Shop and Best Buy have the 16gb model priced at $499. Unfortunately, I think that public perception will be that a smaller tablet should have a smaller price.

    Until somebody can put up a competitive low end model at a lower price point than the low end iPad 2, I don’t think we’ll have any real competition in the tablet space.

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